A 17-year old from Utah has committed suicide after suffering homophobic bullying at school.
Jack Reese killed himself on April 22. His funeral was held on Friday.

Jack’s boyfriend, Alex Smith, spoke earlier in the week at a community event during which a film on bullying was being screened.

17-year old, Jack Reese, from Utah committed suicide after suffering homophobic bullying at school
Smith recalled, without even realising that Jack had already taken his own life, how his boyfriend was repeatedly bullied at school.

Tyler Clementi (December 19, 1991–September 22, 2010) was an eighteen-year-old student at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge on September 22, 2010. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, and a fellow hallmate, Molly Wei, used iChat between a webcam on Ravi's computer and a computer in Wei's dorm room to view, without Clementi's knowledge, Clementi kissing another man.

The 10th grade student documented his life, including his depression and the hardships of being a gay teen, in a blog, reports the Ottawa Citizen.

The blog, called "You Can't Break... When You're Already Broken" featured posts with numerous references to and photos of self harm and cutting, pictures of guys kissing and mentions of wanting a boyfriend, and bleak, ominous messages like "Sometimes I wish the breeze would just take me with it," "The only thing worse than being hated is being ignored. At least when they hate you they treat you like you exist," and "Suicides is always an option."

Other posts revealed how difficult school was for Hubley:

"I hate being the only open gay guy in my school… It f***ing sucks, I really want to end it. Like all of it, I not getting better theres 3 more years of highschool left, Iv been on 4 different anti -depressants, none of them worked. I’v been depressed since january, How f***ing long is this going to last. People said “It gets better”. Its f***ing bull****. I go to see psychologist, What the f*** are they suppost to f***ing do? All I do is talk about problems, it doesnt make them dissapear?? I give up."

More than one hundred classmates of Phillip Parker, who was just 14 when he committed suicide Friday, were quick to contact Parker’s parents to tell them that he was the victim of relentless anti-gay bullying. Phillip Parker’s parents told the media they had contacted the school numerous times to complain about the bullying, but it’s unclear what, if anything, administrators at Gordonsville High School, in Gordonsville, Tennessee, did. Tonight, Phillip’s parents and grandparents are scheduled to meet with school officials.

The front page of the Gordonsville High School website claims:

The mission of GHS is to help all students become responsible, self-directed learners capable of functioning in today’s ever-changing society. GHS is committed to helping all students develop the skills necessary to thrive in the face of life’s challenges. This will take place in a secure environment free from violence, drugs, and fear.

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Here's what the Phillip's grandfather Paul Harris had to say about him:

"A sweet kind person like Phillip took it out on himself, he killed himself to get out of the pain." "Because he was gay, he got mistreated physically, mentally by several people out there at the school, and I am very resentful as a result of it." “After he did what he did, we found out a lot that we didn’t know and there is a lot of bullying that goes on at the school.”

Tragic news to report from Indiana. Like Jaheem Herrera, Carl Walker-Hoover, and Eric Mohat, 15-year-old Billy Lucas' suicide appears to have been inspired by anti-gay bullying at school.

Reports local station WXIN:

"The 15-year-old never told anyone he was gay but students at Greensburg High School thought he was and so they picked on him. 'People would call him 'fag' and stuff like that, just make fun of him because he's different basically,' said student Dillen Swango. Students told Fox59 News it was common knowledge that children bullied Billy and from what they said, it was getting worse. Last Thursday, Billy's mother found him dead inside their barn. He had hung himself. Students said on that same day, some students told Billy to kill himself. 'They said stuff like 'you're like a piece of crap' and 'you don't deserve to live.' Different things like that. Talked about how he was gay or whatever,' said Swango."

WTHR reports:

"Friends of Lucas say that he had been tormented for years. 'Some people at school called him names,' Hughes said, saying most of those names questioned Lucas' sexual orientation, and that Lucas, for the most part, did little to defend himself. 'He would try to but people would just try to break him down with words and stuff and just pick on him,' Hughes said."

As the aunt of six nephews and one niece you can't imagine how much this story saddens and pisses me off all at the same time. This is a prime eample of what we do to people when we perceive them as different in our society. This story of little Carl is so heartbreaking, but it should be used as a reality check to us all. There is no reason why this young boy shouldn't be with his family.

Via Advocate.com:

The mother of an 11-year-old sixth-grader who committed suicide by wrapping an extension cord around his neck and hanging himself says her son’s death could have been prevented -- he was a victim of school bullying, she says.

Sirdeaner L. Walker said she found her son Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover dead on the second floor of their Springfield, Mass.

The small town of Chatham, Ontario has been rocked by the sudden death of Coltyn Mayrand, a 16-year-old trans teen who passed away Saturday night.

There is some question, though, as to the cause of Mayrand’s death: He’s believed to have committed suicide, though no official report has been made public. And though family members admit Coltyn was bullied for being trans, they say it wasn’t the root of his problems:

“As much as bullying is a terrible thing, and may have affected Coltyn, we do not believe that bullying played a large part in our loss of Coltyn,” posted Page Elizabeth Mayrand on Facebook. “We appreciate the kind thoughts and words, but we don’t need everyone out there putting blame and criticisms on anyone, for any reasons.”

I'm afraid I must deliver some more bad, horribly familiar news: a 19-year old college student named Raymond Chase has committed suicide. Chase, a student of culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, hung himself for reasons that remain unclear. Regardless of his motive, this is a horrible tragedy.

The gay group Campus Pride sent out a statement about Chase's death: "The loss of Raymond this week is the second college LGBT-related suicide in a week and the fifth teenage LGBT suicide in three weeks. The suicide of this openly gay young man is for reasons currently unknown; however, the recent pattern of LGBT youth suicides is cause for grave concern,” remarked the group's executive director, Shane Windmeyer.

CASHMERE, Wash. — Family and friends gathered for a candlelight vigil on Friday evening to remember 14-year-old Rafael Morelos, who hanged himself on Sunday, Jan. 29. Rafael was openly gay, and friends said he was bullied because of it.

Rafael’s mother, Malinda Morelos, said said she did not know that her son was bullied until students at another vigil earlier in the week told her.

“Almost all the kids here told me he was being bullied,” Morelos told the Wenatchee World.

Morelos said she had known for several years that her son was gay, but that he kept his feelings to himself — she said she she had no idea what he was going through.

Brandon Bitner, 14, Committed Suicide Last Week By Running Into the Path of a Tractor-Trailer in Pennsylvania

Bitner left behind a note saying that he was tired of being called names such as 'faggot' and 'sissy' and said he wanted to call attention to the problem of bullying. He started attending Midd-West High School in Midddleburg this year but never told his family or the school that he was being bullied so badly.

He never disclosed his sexual orientation, but Bitner now becomes another youth who has taken his life after being subjected to name calling and bullying in his school.

Asher Brown, a 13-year-old student at Hamilton Middle School in Cypress, Texas, shot himself to death on September 23. Asher Brown's parents say that he was "bullied to death", picked on for two years by bullies at school.

Asher Brown was bullied for being gay; he came out to his stepfather, David Truong, on the morning of his death.

Amy and David Truong say that they complained to the school about the bullying of Asher several times, but nothing was ever done. Cypress-Fairbanks School District spokeswoman Kelli Durham denies that any complaints were made.

The recent 'bullycide' deaths of Eric Mohat and Carl Walker-Hoover certainly weren't the first, and won't likely be the last, but I didn't expect to read this story about Jaheem Herrera, which is similar in almost every aspect to Walker-Hoover's, just one week later.

And like Walker-Hoover's, it includes a school tone-deaf to a mother's concerns, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

"On Thursday afternoon, after returning home from Dunaire Elementary School, Jaheem quietly went into his room and hanged himself. His 10-year-old sister, Yerralis, also a fifth-grader, discovered Jaheem’s dead body. 'His sister was screaming, ‘Get him down, get him down,’' said Norman Keene, who helped raise Jaheem since the boy was two years old. When Keene got to the room, he saw Yerralis holding her brother, trying to remove the pressure of the noose her brother had fashioned with a fabric belt. Jaheem was bullied relentlessly, his family said. Keene said the family knew the boy was a target, but until his death they didn’t understand the scope. 'We’d ask him, ‘Jaheem, what’s wrong with you?’' Keene recalled. 'He’d never tell us.' He didn’t want his sister to tell, either. She witnessed much of the bullying, and many times rose to her brother’s defense, Keene said. 'They called him gay and a snitch,' his stepfather said. 'All the time they’d call him this.' In an interview with WSB-TV, the boy’s mother, Masika Bermudez, also said her son was being bullied at school. She said she had complained to the school. She said she asked him about the bullying Thursday when he came home from school and he denied it. She sent him to his room to calm down. It was the last time she would see him alive."

Eric Mohat, 17, was harassed so mercilessly in high school that when one bully said publicly in class, "Why don't you go home and shoot yourself, no one will miss you," he did.

Now his parents, William and Janis Mohat of Mentor, Ohio, have filed a lawsuit in federal court, saying that their son endured name-calling, teasing, constant pushing and shoving and hitting in front of school officials who should have protected him.

The lawsuit -- filed March 27, alleges that the quiet but likable boy, who was involved in theater and music, was called "gay," "fag," "queer" and "homo" and often in front of his teachers. Most of the harassment took place in math class and the teacher -- an athletic coach -- was accused of failing to protect the boy.

"When you lose a child like this it destroys you in ways you can't even describe," Eric Mohat's father told ABCNews.com.

Ryan Patrick Halligan (December 18, 1989 – October 7, 2003) was an American schoolboy from Essex Junction, Vermont, who committed suicide at the age of 13 after being bullied from his classmates in real life and cyber-bullying online. According to the Associated Press, Halligan was repeatedly sent instant messages from middle school classmates accusing him of being gay, and was "threatened, taunted and insulted incessantly".

John Halligan's son, Ryan, committed suicide on Oct. 7, 2003, after being bullied by classmates at school and online. He was 13 years old. In this interview, Halligan discusses the tragedy, the events leading up to it, and what he discovered about his son's online life afterwards. He believes that holding teens accountable for their behavior online is key to preventing the kind of cyberbullying that his son suffered. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted Oct. 19, 2007.

- snip -

We had a great conversation. We ended the call like we always did. I said, "Ryan, I love you." "Dad, I love you." "I'll call you again tomorrow from Rochester." That was the last time I talked to Ryan.

The next phone call was from my wife, 6:00 in the morning, just as I was waking up in this hotel room in Rochester. When the phone rang, I immediately thought, now she's taking the kids to school; she's probably having a hard time finding his backpack or something. I was never prepared for what I heard.

My wife was screaming and crying hysterically: "John, you need to come home. You need to come home. Our son is dead. Ryan killed himself."

The disturbing spate of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) teen suicides continues with news that another California student has taken his own life.

As The Sacramento Bee is reporting, 18-year-old Jeffrey Fehr hanged himself on New Year's Day in the front entrance of his family's Granite Bay home. Although Fehr had been openly gay since his sophomore year of high school and had recently been treated for depression following the end of a relationship, his parents Pati and Steve believe that a lifetime of enduring anti-gay bullying led their son, who reportedly just completed his first semester at Sierra College, to commit suicide.

"We will second-guess ourselves forever," Steve told the Bee. "But we do know that for years and years, people knocked him down for being different. It damaged him. It wore on him. He could never fully believe how wonderful he was, and how many people loved him."

Fehr was known as a talented athlete, and became captain of his high school's cheerleading squad (which had previously been all-female) his senior year. Still, friends recall Fehr being taunted for his decision to join the squad.

Austin Rodriguez, a gay teen at Wellsville High School in Ohio who came out of the closet 6-8 months ago and immediately faced bullying from fellow students, attempted to take his own life last Friday by swallowing pills, and remains on a ventilator in the hospital, WFMJ reports:

She says at first her son appeared happy and relieved , and then she thought he may have been going through a depression and asked him about it several times, but he never really explained the extent of what he was going through...

...From what his mother has learned, the bullying was not only cruel, but enough to make a teenager who was already introverted, feel like an outcast. "It was electronic, it was face to face bullying, they were hiding his gym clothes because they didn't want him changing in the locker room with them. They didn't want him to eat by them, or in the school lunchroom," Rodriguez said.

Following a rash of suicides among gay teens last year, a 19-year-old gay filmmaker who recorded an “It Gets Better” video committed suicide this week, the blog Queer Landia reported Thursday.

Eric James Borges, of Visalia, Calif., was a volunteer at the Trevor Project, an organization that works to prevent suicides against LGBT youth. The Trevor Project confirmed Queer Landia’s report.

“He was a volunteer teaching suicide prevention, so he knew what counseling was available to him,” Laura McGuinnis, a spokeswoman for the Trevor Project, told the Post. “Unfortunately suicide is so complicated, so rooted in mental illness, that it is difficult to know why he made that decision. It is very, very sad.”

According to the Trevor Project, LGBT youths whose parents reject them for their sexuality are eight times more at risk for suicide than teens whose parents accept them.

In his video for “It Gets Better,” a project in which adults tell kids someday their lives will be brighter, Borges talked about the homophobia he experienced. He said his “extremist Christian” family called him “disgusting,” and kicked him out of the house in October. He recounted an instance in which he said his mother performed an exorcism to try to make him straight.